Saturday, February 20, 2016

With News Of Umberto Eco's Death Yesterday Here's His "...How To Write a Thesis"

In general, the how-to book—whether on beekeeping, piano-playing, or
wilderness survival—is a dubious object, always running the risk of
boring readers into despairing apathy or hopelessly perplexing them with
complexity. Instructional books abound, but few succeed in their
mission of imparting theoretical wisdom or keen, practical skill. The
best few I’ve encountered in my various roles have mostly done the
former. In my days as an educator, I found abstract, discursive books
like Robert Scholes’ Textual Power or poet and teacher Marie Ponsot’s lyrical Beat Not the Poor Desk
infinitely more salutary than more down-to-earth books on the art of
teaching. As a sometime writer of fiction, I’ve found Milan Kundera’s
idiosyncratic The Art of the Novel—a book that might have been titled The Art of Kundera—a
great deal more inspiring than any number of other well-meaning
MFA-lite publications. And as a self-taught audio engineer, I’ve found a
book called Zen and the Art of Mixing—a classic of the genre, even shorter on technical specifications than its namesake is on motorcycle maintenance—better than any other dense, diagram-filled manual.

How I wish, then, that as a onetime (longtime) grad student, I had
had access to the English translation, just published this month, of
Umberto Eco’s How to Write a Thesis,
a guide to the production of scholarly work worth the name by the
highly celebrated Italian novelist and intellectual. Written originally
in Italian in 1977, before Eco’s name was well-known for such works of
fiction as The Name of the Rose and Foucault’s Pendulum, How to Write Thesis is appropriately described by MIT Press
as reading: “like a novel”: “opinionated… frequently irreverent,
sometimes polemical, and often hilarious.” For example, in the second
part of his introduction, after a rather dry definition of the academic
“thesis,” Eco dissuades a certain type of possible reader from his book,
those students “who are forced to write a thesis so that they
may graduate quickly and obtain the career advancement that originally
motivated their university enrollment.” These students, he writes, some
of whom “may be as old as 40” (gasp), “will ask for instructions on how
to write a thesis in a month.” To them, he recommends two pieces of advice, in full knowledge that both are clearly “illegal”:

(a) Invest a reasonable amount of money in having a
thesis written by a second party. (b) Copy a thesis that was written a
few years prior for another institution. (It is better not to copy a
book currently in print, even if it was written in a foreign language.
If the professor is even minimally informed on the topic, he will be
aware of the book’s existence.

Italian author Umberto Eco, who became famous for the 1980 international blockbuster The Name of the Rose, has died aged 84.

La Repubblica newspaper said it had been informed by the family that
Eco died late on Friday night at his home in northern Italy.

Eco
was virtually unknown outside university circles until well into middle
age, when he found himself an international celebrity overnight after
he published his first novel, an unorthodox detective story set in a
medieval monastery.

“He was an extraordinary example of European intellectualism, uniting
a unique intelligence of the past with an inexhaustible capacity to
anticipate the future,” Prime Minister Matteo Renzi was quoted as saying
by the Italian news agency Ansa.

For the professor from Bologna University, then aged 48, it was a
late introduction into the world of international literary fame and one
that took many critics by surprise.The Name of the Rose, with its highly detailed description
of life in a 14th-century monastery and learned accounts of the
philosophical and religious disputes of the time, at face value was
hardly a novel to appeal to the average modern reader.

But the book’s popularity lay in a clever plot line, the masterfully
evoked atmosphere of fear and gloom brooding over the monastery, and the
attractive central figure, unashamedly modelled on the famous detective
Sherlock Holmes.

As the novel opens an ageing priest, anxious to record the story
before he dies, looks back on events that took place in 1327 when as an
18-year-old novice he visited a sinister Italian monastery with his
master, Brother William of Baskerville.

During their stay several of the monks are gruesomely murdered and
William and his young assistant are soon involved in a detective hunt to
track down the villain.

The unusual juxtaposition of a gripping storyline and erudite scholasticism helped to explain why The Name of the Rose was translated into dozens of languages, sold more than 14m copies and won several international literary prizes....MORE

And from the New York Times:

Umberto Eco, 84, Best-Selling Academic Who Navigated Two Worlds, Dies

Umberto
Eco, an Italian scholar in the arcane field of semiotics who became the
author of best-selling novels, notably the blockbuster medieval mystery
“The Name of the Rose,” died on Friday in Italy. He was 84.

His
Italian publisher, Bompiani, confirmed his death, according to the
Italian news agency ANSA. He died at his home in Milan, according to the
Italian news website Il Post. No cause was given.

As
a semiotician, Mr. Eco sought to interpret cultures through their signs
and symbols — words, religious icons, banners, clothing, musical
scores, even cartoons — and published more than 20 nonfiction books on
these subjects while teaching at the University of Bologna, Europe’s
oldest university.

But
rather than segregate his academic life from his popular fiction, Mr.
Eco infused his seven novels with many of his scholarly preoccupations.

In
bridging these two worlds, he was never more successful than he was
with “The Name of the Rose,” his first novel, which was originally
published in Europe in 1980. It sold more than 10 million copies in
about 30 languages. (A 1986 Hollywood adaptation directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud and starring Sean Connery received only a lukewarm reception.)...MORE